Social networks are increasing in popularity and are commonly used for sharing information. Public communities represent potentially valuable information sources that can leverage the wisdom of the crowd. However, the ability to find information can be extremely difficult given the amount of information, the lack of structure to organize it, and the broad reach of the social networks. Thus, emerging social networks have limited applicability in enterprise and business contexts because the business relevance of emerging topics is rather low. Additionally, there are situations and topics where posting in a way that unknown individuals can view would be inappropriate from a business perspective.
Thus, there are situations in which any of a variety of conditions matter such as trust in topic participants, confidentiality, and reduction of spam, where posting into a large anonymous audience might be culturally inadequate as well as ineffective for the intended purpose. In addition to confidentiality and security risk, the ratio of “signal to noise” or good information versus useless or bad information is too high in current social networks to be of significant use in business situations, and reduces the usefulness of current social networks even in social contexts.
Additionally, community conversations or social networking interactions arising in current social networks are fragmented and redundant, making relevant information harder to find. There are a great number of social networking possibilities with no underlying structure to assist a user in determining relevance of topics, making it difficult for users to track and contribute to desired conversations. For at least all of the above reasons, current social networking offerings do not provide an effective forum for social networking in a business context.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.